I decided to take the plunge. After years of watching upbeat, inspirational commercials and listening to long tales over the dinner table about my family lineage, I was ready to get a DNA test. As the only child of two pretty skeptical parents (“You can’t trust anybody!” is my Bronx-born mother’s favorite saying), turning over a sizeable sample of my genes to an outside company was a pretty large act of trust. But sometimes in life, your questions outweigh your fears. There are just things you need to know, and in this case, only spitting into a test tube could give them to me.

The questions I hoped to answer by getting a DNA test were fairly common ones for a lot of Black Americans whose ancestors survived the Middle Passage only to be scattered across the United States and forced into brutal labor on this land — where did my African ancestors actually come from? What regions of America did we all end up in? And did I really have those Cherokee Native American ancestors my daddy’s side of the family claimed to have? There was a time when these answers were all known to Black families. In fact, the term  “griot” means storyteller. In West Africa, the griot…